Brace yourself for the density.
If you haven’t driven around Buncombe or Henderson counties lately and checked out some of the new, densely packed subdivisions being built, you ought to take a Sunday drive. It’s a glimpse of the future, as well as the present.
Take a spin out Pond Road in Enka or down Rutledge Road on the border of Buncombe and Henderson counties and scout out some of the new neighborhoods. What will immediately strike you is they’re fairly sizable homes with almost no yards, or in some cases attached townhomes that take up a block before a gap appears.
And it looks like this is what’s coming to Haw Creek, nestled in a valley in East Asheville, with the proposed development of The Meadows at New Haw Creek. The development will feature 60 single-family homes and 35 townhomes. The houses are planned for the east side of New Haw Creek Road, the townhomes to the west.
This 27-acre parcel lies within the Asheville limits, and the city’s Planning & Zoning Commission approved the plans March 20 on a 4-3 split vote. It goes to Asheville City Council on April 23. If Council approves the plan, it will have a final review by the city’s Technical Review Committee.
I met with concerned neighbors last week at the site, and what immediately struck me is that this is a project that illustrates the crux of the transition Asheville, Buncombe and surrounding areas are going through. Formerly rural land, or at least older houses on unusually large lots, that were owned by older folks who’ve passed on, now will become housing for dozens or hundreds of families.
It’s a pretty site, with huge old-growth trees, a rolling meadow and Haw Creek running through it.
The developer, L.B. Jackson & Company of Arden, wants to pack in cookie cutter homes where neighbors can almost reach out the windows and high five each other during Carolina basketball games. I’m not knocking Jackson — we need homes and people snap these up — but it’s kind of a stark contrast to homes sitting on five or 10 acres apiece like they did in the old days.
Neighbors say they’re not anti-development
Not surprisingly, neighbors have raised a lot of concerns about The Meadows, including increased traffic, loss of tree canopy, lack of compatibility with existing homes in the area, concerns about the flood plain and increased flooding, creation of more impervious surfaces, and what they say is a lack of negotiating with the developer.
Haw Creek resident Susan Bicknell said the neighborhood design is kind of “a shock.”
“His designs are that every house is identical, and they’re all eight feet apart,” Bicknell said. “And then there’s no trees. He takes everything.”
The developer and the lawyer representing the project dispute that notion, but the project would reduce the tree canopy on site from 53 percent to 17 percent, according to a city planning staff report. The staff recommended approval of the plan, by the way, noting it meets the city’s development ordinance requirements, as well as long-term goals set out in the comprehensive plan.
By right, meaning the right of a landowner to use the property, Jackson could build 49 homes on the tract, or divide it and do 49 on each side of the road in separate projects. That would not require City Council approval, and it also would mean no greenways or buffers the developer has agreed to do already, said Derek Allen, an attorney representing The Meadows.
But the developer is seeking a conditional zoning change that would allow for the 95 homes to go up, and that does require City Council approval.
“And what City Council and city planners have told us all along is that a conditional zoning is an opportunity for negotiation,” said Chris Pelly, another Haw Creek neighbor and a former Asheville City Council member. “He’s not negotiating.”
I asked the city’s Planning and Urban Design folks about this, and they responded via City of Asheville spokesperson Kim Miller.
“Any developer must meet the new and revised neighborhood meeting standards to move forward with an application,” Miller said via email. “There is nothing in the process of conditional zoning that states that the applicant must/shall negotiate with residents.”
Pelly and the four other neighbors I met with stress that they are not anti-development and are not opposed to all residential development on the site.
“Our pitch to City Council is basically, ‘Look, we know we need more housing. We know this is a site that’s suitable for housing in many ways, and we’re not opposed to a development here,” Pelly said. “But what we are opposed to is somebody that wants to double it, and then not do anything for the community, even though we’re gonna have more traffic, more flooding, more everything, basically.”
Haw Creek resident Terry Laconich said they never started out with a “Not in our back yard” stance, often called NIMBYism.
“We understand the city wants to infill because you have lower infrastructure costs, and so we recognize this is going to be developed,” Laconich said.
But the residents say they’ve had four meetings with the developer, including one required by city code, and Laconich said true give-and-take is sorely lacking. He noted that the larger trees slated for removal absorb much more harmful carbon and produce much more helpful oxygen than newly planted saplings, but he said the developer has not shown a willingness to change the layout of streets or construction footprint of homes to keep some trees standing.
“They’re never negotiating,” Laconich said, noting that Allen, the attorney who represents The Meadows, told the Planning & Zoning Commission that they had to stick with 95 units. “Because his final word,” Laconich said, “was, ‘We need to make the numbers work. We need 95 units to make the numbers work.’”
Pelly said the residents would love to see a loop trail through a six-acre wooded section on the property’s western border that would connect to Evergreen Charter School. But this would require the developer to agree not to develop the six acres.
Allen told me in a phone interview that they have negotiated with neighbors during and after the four neighborhood meetings, and that “the hardest part with that is trying to balance all the things folks want.”
In the Planning & Zoning meeting, Allen said there “has been significant progress” on concerns about traffic, open space and connectivity.
Allen started off at the meeting with a bigger-picture outlook, noting how historically, exclusionary zoning has kept more-affordable residential developments, such as townhomes or densely packed housing, out of many areas. The city has expressed its desire to see more infill housing and more density, which should translate into more affordable homes, although this development is going to have market rate homes.
Still, the idea is that more housing of all types is needed, and more housing on the market should lead to more affordability in housing.
“We talk about this all the time as a community,” Allen said March 20. “I’m here to tell you, that policy — this is what it looks like. It’s not going to go into some area where there aren’t folks. That’s just not gonna happen.”
He showed a map of the development, noting how much existing development is already in Haw Creek.
“There’s not just some magic piece of property where this is just going to go where we can put this and everybody is going to high-five,” Allen said.
Kevin Jackson, with L.B. Jackson & Company, said typically they’re “spec builders,” meaning they build the houses first and sell as they go. He also acknowledged that building tighter or erecting townhomes does allow for “better economies of scale by building more,” as the price per square foot is much lower.
“What does the community get?”
John Noor, a Haw Creek resident and attorney who works on land use cases, also spoke at the March meeting. He has worked with the neighbors but wasn’t officially working the case at the meeting as an attorney.
Noor pointed out that the developer is asking for 95 homes.
“That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but in return for that, what does the community get?” Noor said.
He mentioned the talks about preserving more trees, better connections for greenways, and potential sidewalks (the city approved these nearly a decade ago and they still haven’t been built).
Like Allen, Noor took a more universal approach, citing recent controversial developments like the one on Charlotte Street that involved tearing down old homes for a higher-density project.
Noor said they become “the five stages of grief and a pitchfork event where everybody comes out and is hostile to the development because the process doesn’t incentivize the negotiation between an organized neighborhood and the applicant.”
“If we can figure that out here, my hope is that we won’t have every single one of these projects come to P&Z and to council and be that hostile type of event,” Noor said. “Instead the developer knows I’ve got to from the beginning work with the community because (that’s what expected).”
He asked the Planning & Zoning Commission to give neighbors more time to work with the developer to sort out the problems.
Well, that didn’t happen.
Allen had said they really need to keep the ball rolling, which developers and their lawyers always say, even though sometimes developments languish for years when the developers aren’t feeling the burn. I’ll also note that it also always seems like developers have to have exactly X number of homes or apartments on a project for it to make money and be acceptable to investors.
In this case the number is 95, but there’s always a number, and it must remain inviolate. My suspicion here is that, sure, the number could change, but then the developer and the investors would only make gobs of money, instead of gobs and gobs.
Perhaps that’s cynical. But really, how many poor developers do you know?
Also, how many neighborhoods have you seen where old trees were left standing? I know in my development, built 25 years ago, they started out leaving most of the trees on the lots, nestling the houses among them.
Then when they got in a hurry, and maybe a little greedier, they just mowed them all down, brought in fill dirt and made level pads on which to slap up homes. Let’s not pretend that making money is not the main driver.
“If you look in all these neighborhoods — I mean I have 11 huge oaks in my front yard, and so do all these houses back here,” another Haw Creek neighbor, Stefanie Kovacs, told me as I talked with the group.
Kovacs said they have a petition with more than 2,000 signatures on it opposing the project.
“It doesn’t say we’re against development,” Kovacs said. “It’s just opposing it as is.”
The neighbors have had community discussions, meetings, and email groups, she said, “and we’ve talked about how we are willing to negotiate.I personally still think 70 houses is too much, but you know what? If that’s what we can get, that would be great, if you can have some trees left,” Kovacs said.
We’re all here because of development
Here’s another angle I always find fascinating in these discussions: None of us are from here originally. Sure, some families go back to the 1700s around here — when Haw Creek attracted the first white settlers — but unless you’re Cherokee, you’re not from here.
Every single house, subdivision, neighborhood, town, or city that people live in wasn’t here once. We’re all here because of development.
Pelly originally is from New Jersey but has lived here since 1990, while Kovacs is from Maryland but has been in Asheville since 2000. Bicknell has lived in Asheville for 30 years, with 20 of those in Haw Creek. Resident Tom Lodge, a wetlands ecologist who shared his concerns about the potential for more flooding with the development, is from Florida but has been here for 20 years. Laconich has been here for six years.
I’ve been here for 29 years. We all love this place and these beautiful mountains — and yes, the lovely old farmhouses and pastures that used to dominate the area — but you can’t just close the door on newcomers.
“I think that I would love to close the door. I mean, I hate change,” Bicknell said with a laugh. “I hate losing this beauty. But something’s going to happen here.”
Lodge, like the others, just wants the development to have the least possible impact, and he has real concerns that drainage and flooding aren’t being addressed properly.
“The fact that Haw Creek ends up being the only channel carrying that on down through, and Haw Creek has three bridges to go under,” Lodge said. “Those are all potentially compromised by floodwater. And if this sets a precedent for how development is done, we see a big problem.”
What I’d like to see happen in these cases is exactly what these neighbors are asking for — more negotiations, more give-and-take, more willingness on the developers’ parts to keep huge old trees and preserve as much open space as possible. I’ll note that this development preserves nine acres of open space, with much of it the flood-prone area, and that’s better than a lot, and more than what’s required.
But how great would it be to have a woodland trail at the top of the neighborhood, as Pelly suggests? Can you try to make that work?
The neighbors in this case — and in many others I’ve covered over the years — feel the system is rigged in favor of the developers. And in many ways it is, as we are a country based on free enterprise and property rights.
Neighbors also feel that boards and councils don’t really listen to them, although I’ll note the Planning & Zoning board chair said the board had read every comment sent to them, and they did discuss the hot-button issues in this case, including tree canopy, sidewalks and connectivity.
Before voting, the commission added six conditions to the Meadows project, including that the developer agrees not to clear cut trees in the project’s buffer areas, that a greenway in the project will include a public use easem*nt, and that they’ll add a signalized crosswalk from the townhomes across the street for safety, subject to NCDOT approval.
So there has been some give and take, but it’s not everything the neighbors want. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it’s never going to be.
Development like this is going to keep happening in Asheville, Buncombe and beyond, in part because we need the housing, in part because it’s the most economical to build and generates solid profits for developers.
But City Council and other bodies also should take the long view on this and really consider what they want our area to look like in 10 years or 20.
Kovacs told me she thinks that if the city approves this project as is, “they’re setting a precedent for Haw Creek and all of Asheville, just saying, ‘We’re just building houses, and we are not open to having reasonable discussions or planning them well.’”
“And that’s the thing — we need to plan Asheville well,” Kovacs said. “Otherwise, it’s going to be completely uncontrolled.”
It should be an interesting City Council meeting on April 23, to say the least.
Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. John Boyle has been covering Asheville and surrounding communities since the 20th century. You can reach him at (828) 337-0941, or via email at jboyle@avlwatchdog.org. The Watchdog’s reporting is made possible by donations from the community. To show your support for this vital public service please visit avlwatchdog.org/donate.
